Appealing against £250,000? Surely it will cost them more in legal fees and bad PR if they dont just pay up.

But the ruling potentially opens Sony up to civil claims from victims. I mean, you could bring a suit against Sony regardless of the ruling, but "and ICO said it was their fault" is a convincing argument to bring to a judge...

£250K - That's nothing for Sony, a minute or so of global trading. What they should do in these cases is put a ban on them exporting good for 1 to 2 weeks. That would be a much bigger fine and would have a better effect.

Can't count the number of services that got hacked and might have lost customer data. It has not even been proven that credit card data was stolen so you will have a hard time proving you need to be compensated.

Its not the fine that matters its the symbolism. Sure if we are talking a fine of several million then it matters, but the fact is anything short of the hundreds of millions can probably be shrugged of by a big (if struggling) company like Sony.

What counts is that the company has been shown up as wrong and left red-faced. It also as mentioned opens the door to a whole bunch of consumer lawsuits as well as setting further precedent for related cases for the company.

While its not as effective as a massive fine it has clearly still had some form of impact on Sony if they are planning to appeal for an amount that is unlikely to even register on their radar. Tbh being found guilty seriously undermines consumer trust in Sony with important account information, most of all credit card information that is important to services such as PSN (For both parties). Its just another blow for what was already a PR disaster. There is no longer anyway for the company to state innocence or that it was wholly the shear determination and skill of the hackers.

It must really suck for them as i think they fessed up to the ICO in the first place with what happened.
Makes me wonder if they had not informed the ICO would they eventually have been investigated anyway?